by Dex Armstrong
From:
GEORGEBLU@aol.com
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2001 11:04 AM
Subject: DECK APES
Hi All;
Well Dex has done it again, it's great. Fortunately I was never a deck ape even when I came into Submarines via Spritz's Navy. Started in Subs as a lowly 3rd class Electrician, but over time spent my share tracing and fixing wires under the deck plates topside, but had my share of "hidey holes" known only to me, Heh, Heh, Heh. Read and enjoy, I'm sure it will bring back memories to at least to some of you. Happy New Year 2002.
Ole Cip
Where is it all now?
by Bob 'Dex' Armstrong
The deckforce was made up of a collection of moles and ferrets who spent most of
their time wiggling around in the crawl space between the walking deck and the
pressure hull, In port.
Like small animals in the wild, invisibility was the key to survival. The world
of the E-3, Non-rated bluejacket, in the era of petroleum powered submersibles,
you had to remain out of sight or blend in with your surroundings to be okay.
Chief Petty Officers were vested with power on par with God, With the exception
of the part about changing water into wine. God kept that one to himself so CPOs
didn't destroy their livers and have God's diesel submarines snorkeling around
in five-mile deep Gallo screw top Muscatel.
The code of Chief Petty Officers requires only two things, First they must
surrender their souls to the Devil and second, they must make life a
burning hell for E-3s. It is not their fault -- comes with the pay grade.
Chiefs feel some kind of obsessive need to keep every animal on the planet
engaged in some kind of time consuming activity, Not necessarily
productive activity. In my day, if a Chief found you parked in the mess decks
between 8 AM and 4 PM, having a smoke and wrapping yourself around a hot cup of
coffee, he felt that the sun would not come up the following day
if he didn't put your lazy butt to work.
"Hey Dex."
"Yo, Chief."
"Why don't you grab a can of Brasso and give the urinal piping in number 2 a
little buff up?"
In the life of anything above E-6, shiny copper pipe had a highly elevated level
of importance. I always had this feeling that while all the animals in the
Alley, were dreaming of perky tits and cute little fannies, the old coots in the
Goatlocker were fantasizing about bright copper pipe and urinal valves.
The best things to do were:
(a) Remain out of the eyeball range of CPOs or if in range:
(b) Give the appearance of being totally absorbed in productive work.
Lets take (b). (This is giving away trade secrets.) There were several things
you could do. For example, the Navy had little green cloth-covered
notebooks, They used them for damn near everything. If you had one, it validated
the legitimacy of whatever you were doing even if you weren't doing anything but
looking very serious and just entering random, totally
meaningless 4-digit numbers in columns, that you were making up as you went
along.
A nice theatrical touch could be added, if you stopped every now and then and
stared aimlessly at the overhead and scratched your head with the eraser end of
your pencil. No Chief would think of interrupting a sailor recording figures.
This was found to be effective throughout the submarine force.
Another popular flim-flam was the 'sealed envelope' trick. You can go damn near
anywhere in the Navy if you walk fast, have a purposeful look and a sealed
envelope displayed for all to see. A man with a sealed envelope can go anywhere,
But must wear his white hat (shoes, optional).
We had hiding places. You have to have hiding places or some Chief would put you
to work. We had three.
(1) The 'Siesta Nest' up forward of the impulse air flasks next to bow buoyancy.
Use of this location called for random bursts of pounding on tanks and pressure
hull with tools to create the illusion of productive work.
(2) The photo shop on Orion. Photographers had a racket billet. If Arliegh Burke
had paid them on a piecework basis, they would have had to
figure out how to live on a dollar thirty-five, every two weeks. So you could
always get in a card game in the photo shop. If someone showed up unexpectedly
and demanded to know,
"What'n the hell is going on here?"
"After chow card game sir. Two more hands and it'll be 'turn-to' time again."
"Very well."
I've seen those 'two hands' take damn near five hours.
There was an added benefit to playing cards in a photo lab. They had this big
table with high intensity carbon arc lights focused on it. These lights were
intended to 'burn' images into metal plates so these light-etched metal plates
could be used for 'onboard' printing projects. They could also thaw out and cook
a special order frozen pizza in about five seconds. One minute
it was frozen hard, Then 'whammo', you had perfect bubbling pizza and a
wonderful aroma filling the lab. The bad thing for E-3s was, These 'photo
whatever they were' mates played for money.
(3) In the days before God and Hyman Rickover invented blue and gold boat crews,
scrapped the tender concept and created a clean, No dumpster Pier 22, there was
a secret meeting place in Subron Six known only to the Almighty
and about 30 E-3s. The Fraternal Order of the Deck Ape Costra Nostra and
Subron Six Dope-Offs.
The pier head quonset huts. When the Orion went into the yard for a bottom job,
the Squadron built four weird looking corrugated metal elongated igloo-looking
contraptions called quonset huts. The Squadron Office moved in. They turned one
into a kind of sick bay, No, more like a "I'm busy, what's your damn problem,
take an APC and go somewhere and die quietly" sheep dip conveyor belt, make
believe medical shack. And they turned one into a paint locker.
The paint locker became the damndest hideout E-3s ever created. All the leading
seamen in the Squadron were given keys to this little metal
wonderland. It didn't take a handful of 19-year old idiots long to figure out
that by restacking about five million 5-gallon cans of Methel-Ethyl-Ketone, zinc
chromate and enough Navy number seven gray to paint the entire state of Rhode
Island, we could create enough room for a clandestine card parlor.
The Navy, in its infinite
wisdom installed an air-conditioner to keep the paint from blowing up. The place
was the best thing God ever gave to E-3s, It was one of the best-kept secrets of
the Cold War.
As an interior decoration statement, it left one helluva lot to be desired, At
19, your butt is perfectly comfortable planted on a foul-weather jacket folded
on top of a five gallon MEK can and a four-foot square, three-quarter inch piece
of plywood covered with a ratty blanket,
turned the place into a home away from home. Four decks of ships service
Bicycles and twenty Playboy centerfolds turned it into the site of the
international grand championship of the universe hearts competitions.
We never solved the 'where to take a leak' problem, but after dark we just hosed
down the weeds behind the damage control training center.
Someone got the idea to use
an orange nylon air mail postal bag to haul stomped flat beer cans back to the
scrap metal dumpster on the pier.
A week past, Ray Stone showed me a photo he took of Pier 22 not long ago. The
gahdam place was as clean as an airport runway. Nothing there, No fuel hoses, No
ration boxes, No oil drums, No busted mechanical parts, No dumpsters, No hemp
and nylon lines, No ' Show your I.D. and liberty card' signs nailed to falling
apart guard shacks, No ASR, No tender and no visible human life, Just a sterile
concrete structure.
"Where have all the sailors gone?"
Where have all the laughing bastards in paint spattered dungarees and frayed
raghats gone? Who hauled off the evidence of their passing? Pier 22 was once the
center of our universe. It was alive, It was our world. What in the hell
happened to the neighborhood?